The Agile experiences I've had that were more satisfying were actually the ones that were closer to "by the book" Scrum or Kanban.
The specific things that I've noticed get left out that make Agile miserable are:
- Story pointing goes away
- Velocity never gets calculated
- Retrospectives get removed
I think Agile shifts responsibility off of management and onto the engineers in even the best run team. PMs and management don't have to commit to hard decisions early in the development cycle because the methodology says that overcommitting early will lead to failure.
Velocity and Retrospectives are two of the best features for me.. Velocity is a check on managers over scheduling developers, and Retrospectives force everyone to look failures right in the eye and adapt. When you remove those two things Management can over schedule the team without even realizing it and no one has any data to show it. When you remove retrospectives no one gets to discuss bad parts of the process or bad parts of the planning.
That's just one part of being satisfied though.. if you're doing perfect agile and killing it but you're building a poor product that's not going to be terribly great either.
Most of the reality for me has actually been good products that were right for the market but ended up implemented pretty poorly due to failings that could somewhat be blamed on Agile.. it seems to be getting worse and worse over time in my experience. More technical debt, poorer scalability, more bugs, less QA (you could write a book on QA and Agile).
I did quite a bit of UI early in my career and moved towards back end over time. I was mostly all back end by the time Agile really took off. I am generally pretty depressed with the quality of the back end code under Agile. You get horrible MVP database schemas and awful quickie framework dependent code that is horribly inefficient and really hard to remove later.. but that path is super quick for that MVP "gotta demo" mentality. I think this stuff really kills the morale of back end developers and leads tons of people to move on.
The Agile experiences I've had that were more satisfying were actually the ones that were closer to "by the book" Scrum or Kanban.
The specific things that I've noticed get left out that make Agile miserable are: - Story pointing goes away - Velocity never gets calculated - Retrospectives get removed
I think Agile shifts responsibility off of management and onto the engineers in even the best run team. PMs and management don't have to commit to hard decisions early in the development cycle because the methodology says that overcommitting early will lead to failure.
Velocity and Retrospectives are two of the best features for me.. Velocity is a check on managers over scheduling developers, and Retrospectives force everyone to look failures right in the eye and adapt. When you remove those two things Management can over schedule the team without even realizing it and no one has any data to show it. When you remove retrospectives no one gets to discuss bad parts of the process or bad parts of the planning.
That's just one part of being satisfied though.. if you're doing perfect agile and killing it but you're building a poor product that's not going to be terribly great either.
Most of the reality for me has actually been good products that were right for the market but ended up implemented pretty poorly due to failings that could somewhat be blamed on Agile.. it seems to be getting worse and worse over time in my experience. More technical debt, poorer scalability, more bugs, less QA (you could write a book on QA and Agile).
I did quite a bit of UI early in my career and moved towards back end over time. I was mostly all back end by the time Agile really took off. I am generally pretty depressed with the quality of the back end code under Agile. You get horrible MVP database schemas and awful quickie framework dependent code that is horribly inefficient and really hard to remove later.. but that path is super quick for that MVP "gotta demo" mentality. I think this stuff really kills the morale of back end developers and leads tons of people to move on.